


Chrysalis

by lunabee34 (Lorraine)



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Canon Compliant, Episode: s01e15 Before I Sleep, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-23
Updated: 2014-03-23
Packaged: 2018-01-16 16:15:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1353721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lorraine/pseuds/lunabee34
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A meditation on "Before I Sleep"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chrysalis

1  
Janus tells her that stasis will be a dreamless sleep, but he is wrong. Elizabeth dreams many things cocooned in the deeps of Atlantis. She hears them all dying, their death throes filtered through radio static and layers of water. She knows each stutter in Colonel Sumner’s voice intimately, the way his breath comes choked and raw at the last. She stands on the platform with Rodney and watches the Gate room flood, watches Rodney work until his feet can find no purchase and he is swept over the railing. Elizabeth tries to still his hands as he flails, as his lungs fill, but she can never touch him. She thinks as Rodney’s body drifts along the ceiling, “Next time will be different. Next time.”

2  
When Elizabeth first wakes, she brings her hands to her face and studies their backs. Their veins and wrinkles are new to her, and so is the tissue thinness of the skin across her knuckles. Her knees unhinge stiffly as she makes her way to the ZPMs. When she is finished, Elizabeth unshutters the window and the face she sees superimposed over Atlantis is her mother’s. She is suddenly and acutely afraid that she will not survive the next three thousand years, that her sacrifice will change nothing. She locks herself back into the chamber, parchment clutched in the trembling fingers of her left hand.

3  
Elizabeth is barefoot in the white endlessness of Antarctica and she is kissing Simon. His large hand cups her jaw as if she is fragile, like she is precious. His mouth moves wetly over her own, tongue licking along the seam of her lips, tasting her gasps, sharing her breath. Over Simon’s shoulder, a spacecraft barrels into the ice, arcing up prisms in the brilliant and relentless light. John crawls from the wreckage, his body pushing a slick red trail across the snow. He bleeds out at Elizabeth’s feet. She keeps on kissing Simon, John’s blood a dark bloom on the blank canvas surrounding them.

4  
When she wakes again, Elizabeth is relieved. She rotates the ZPMs, and by their soft amber glow, she decides that she will live once more, if only for a time. In the control room, she runs her hands over the Stargate, along the smooth metal that warms quickly to her touch. She sleeps in the bed that she and Janus once shared and she does not dream. After that single night Elizabeth confines herself to the stasis lab; Atlantis responds to her presence and she though she is not yet ready to sleep again, she does not want to tax the ZPMs any more than is necessary. When she has tired of the silence and the emptiness, Elizabeth seals herself inside the compartment and surrenders to the heavy blackness of stasis.

5  
Elizabeth opens her eyes. Rodney is speaking, waving his fingers in front of her and behaving just as insensitively as she remembers. She looks at his face and he is not gasping for air and he is not clutching at his throat and he is beautiful. She sees herself—her strength, the fierce hope of her youth—and Elizabeth knows then she has succeeded. Outside the window, sunlight gilds the breakers and Atlantis flings her spires to the sky.


End file.
